ACAPULCO, Mexico – There's no nicer place for Canadians in the middle of January, right?

Sandy beaches, warm Pacific waters and an abundance of cold cervezas. All true. But this western Mexican city also sits on a coastline critical to cocaine trafficking routes north in Guerrero state, where drug violence is among the bloodiest in the country.

A few blocks from the fancy hotels, bars and restaurants of Boulevard Miguel Aleman, drugged-out kids stagger on street corners, unheard of even a decade ago in what was a favourite destination of Hollywood stars. From narcotiendas (little drug shops), it's easy to find dealers selling both drugs and soft drinks, as well as ritzy new subdivisions funded by mysterious sources – believed to be drug money – in a country devastated by recession.

"It's almost impossible to prove," says narco-trafficking expert Victor Clark Alfaro, "but then that's the point of laundering money."

A few kilometres inland in any direction from this tourist capital, Mexico's most impoverished farmers – largely indigenous – eke out a living in the arid highlands of the Sierra Madre mountain chain. They live in another century at the end of bad roads inaccessible to all but the most intrepid visitors.

Guerrero used to be mainly an opium poppy and marijuana growing state, but it's evolved in recent years into a critical distribution centre for cocaine from the rest of Latin America. From here, routes snake out everywhere, by land, sea and air. Traffickers use small beaches all up the Pacific tourist coast as landing strips for small planes. A U.S. congressional report last year said 90 per cent of the cocaine destined for the U.S. and Canada comes through Mexico.

Signs of a parallel drug economy – with inherent struggles for power – are evident in the local press.

"Just look," says editor Maribel Gutierrez, pointing to the day's edition of El Sur, a respected Acapulco-based newspaper. A report describes the state hierarchy of the governing Democratic Revolutionary Party appealing to Mexico City after the disappearance of a party official. Another story is about a man found dead up the coast in Petatlan with his ears and a finger cut off, a sure sign of a drug hit.

Petatlan and neighbouring city Zihuatanejo are popular among Canadians, a million of whom visit Mexico annually.

Tourists occasionally see fallout among cartels battling for control in Guerrero. In February, a bus on the Zihuatenejo-Acapulco highway passed a burned-out truck, where four police officers died in a shootout with drug cartel gunmen. Police held up the bus for two hours.

What they don't see, according to Gutierrez, is how farmers throughout the hardscrabble mountains of Guerrero too often pay for the government's war on drugs with their lives, liberty and livelihood.

The government of Mexican President Felipe Calderon, like his predecessors, cites the army as a critical tool in the battle.

"The evidence shows (the army) isn't fighting the big narco-traffickers, but instead poor campesinos," says Gutierrez. "People are vulnerable to repression. But progress against drug trafficking? Really, we see nothing, nothing."

International human rights groups routinely document peasants disappearing after police and army raids. Reports of torture and rape are numerous.

In February, two indigenous leaders – from the Association for the Development of the Mixtec People – disappeared from their Guerrero village after being arrested by men reputing to be police. The bodies of Raul Lucas Lucia and Manuel Ponce Rosas were found days later.

Changing governments to the left-leaning Democratic Revolutionary Party in 2005 made no difference in claims the army is using drugs as a pretext for counter-insurgency campaigns against farmers and social organizers. By the end of its session last October, the Washington-based Inter-American Human Rights Commission had 215 complaints against authorities in Guerrero over four years.

Farmers grow marijuana and opium poppies across the state. But Guerrero is one of Mexico's poorest states and subsistence farmers have little alternative to more lucrative drug crops. That's why eradication efforts appear to be so futile.

A report in the national magazine Proceso argues the state is fast returning to the abuses of the Dirty War years of the 1970s, a period of "crimes against humanity" recently documented by an extensive internal security investigation.

Mexico's National Defence Secretariat ignored a request for an interview from the Toronto Star.

The state is replete with evidence of high-level corruption. In December, Zihuatanejo's police chief was arrested with 22 officers and civilians – and charged with crimes linking then to the cartels.

El Sur documents what it can, but journalists can't get to the heart of internecine battles among cartels. Moreover, it's simply too dangerous.